We kindly inform you that, as long as the subject affiliation of our 300.000+ articles is in progress, you might get unsufficient or no results on your third level or second level search. In this case, please broaden your search criteria.
In the paper fear is treated as semiotical phenomenon. The semiotical speciality of fear is that while being a strong semiotical factor, its semiotical nature is often overshadowed and fear is treated proceeding from the scheme of stimulus-reaction. In the paper fear is analysed in the context of both Peirce's semiotics and Saussure's semiology and it will be demonstrated that these approaches allow to open up different aspects of fear: while in Peircean perspective frightful evokes fear, then proceeding from the Saussure's approach we could say that fear creates the frightful, fear appears to be creative; we could even speak of fear as semiosis.
More...
A symposium The Works of Iurii Lotman in an Interdisciplinary Context: Impact and Applicability has been held at the University of Michigan, USA, on October29, 1999. The premise of the conference was to bring together scholars from a variety of disciplines who have used Lotman in their work and who could reflect on the ways in which Lotman enriches (or, sometimes, fails to enrich) their discipline, as currently practiced in the United States. The conference organizers, Jeremy Shine and the author of these lines, deliberately sought to invite scholars who had had no personal contact with Lotman, be it as colleagues or students. The emphasis was placed on the late works of Lotman, such as Universe of the Mind and Culture and Explosion, those in which Lotman attempts to go beyond the de Saussurian foundations ofhis semiotics. The implicit agenda of the conference, ultimately, was to reclaim some parts of Lotman's works that had not been sufficiently heeded in American academia and that could contribute to a kind of mapping out of the field of post-structuralist Cultural Studies and its various sub-branches. In a paper called "Bipolar disorders: The semiotics of asymmetry in Lotman, Bakhtin, and Levinas", Amy Mandelker proposed a reading of Lotman's Culture and Explosion in the context of theories of otherness inspired by neo-Kantianism and twentieth-century Jewish philosophy (Franz Rosenzweig, Walter Benjamin, and Emmanuel Levinas).
More...
I elaborated the concept of humanistic base texts when I was translating Indian and Chinese classical texts into Estonian. At present, I would classify as such the following works: "BhagavadgTta", a part of Buddhist texts, "Lunyu" by Confucius and the Gospels according to Luke, Matthew and Mark, to mention only a few. This article gives a general survey of the concept, to be specified in the papers to follow.
More...
The expression "artificial animal" denotes a range of different objects from teddy bears to the results of genetic engineering. As a basis for further investigation, this article first of all presents the main interpretations and traces their systematic interconnections. The subsequent sections concentrate on artificial animals in the context of play. The development of material toys is fueled by robotics. It gives toys artificial sense organs, limbs, and cognitive abilities, thus enabling them to act in the real world. The second line of development, closely related to research into Artificial Life, creates virtual beings "living" on computer screens. The most essential difference between these variants are the sense modalities involved in interaction. Virtual beings can only be seen and heard, whereas material toys can be touched as well. Therefore, the simulation of haptic qualities plays an important role. In order to complete the proposed typology, two further areas are outlined, namely artificial animals outside play and "artificial animals in the medium of flesh" which are alive but designed and created by man. Research on artificial animals belongs to an extended notion of ecosemiotics, as they are part of ecosystems which may themselves be virtual such as the Internet.
More...
How does language represent ("mirror") the world it can be used to talk about? Or does it? A negative answer is maintained by one of the main traditions in language theory that includes Frege, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Quine and Rorty. A test case is offered by the question whether the critical "mirroring" relations, especially the notion of truth, are themselves expressible in language. Tarski's negative thesis seemed to close the issue, but dramatic recent developments have decided the issue in favour of the expressibility of truth. At the same time, the "mirroring" relations are not natural ones, but constituted by rule-governed human activities a la Wittgenstein's language games. These relations are nevertheless objective, because they depend only on the rules of these "games", not on the idiosyncrasies of the players. It also turns out that the "truth games" for a language are the same as the language games that give it its meaning in the first place. Thus truth and meaning are intrinsically intertwined.
More...
The meaning of semiotics is to provide theoretical insights and to develop the means of analysis for the whole area where sign systems have a significance. This includes a vast region of our world, and a great part of scientific inquiry. Thus, the importance of this domain of knowledge cannot be changed by fashion, and whatever shifts may occur in popular words or fashionable research, this is no more than a further subject for research in sign systems. The current volume of Sign Systems Studies marks several noticeable events. The inside-outside communication of the Tartu school of semiotics has been (re)established in a mode which gives us the confidence for multilateral communication, and a responsibility in the continuation of the oldest regular publication in the field of semiotics, as established by Juri Lotman in 1964. The signs of this are, on one hand, the publi¬cation of New Tartu Semiotics (Bernard et al. 2000), and, on the other hand, the regularity of publication and the authorship of Sign Systems Studies. In addition to the series Tartu Semiotics Library (cf. Andrews 2000), since this spring, Dissertationes Semioticae Universitatis Tar-tuensis has been born. The formation of Finno-Ugric 'semiotic league' (Randviir & Voigt & Tarasti, this volume) is left as last, but this is not the least to mention.
More...
This essay explores the terminology of semiotics with an eye to the historical layers of human experience and understanding that have gone into making the doctrine of signs possible as a contemporary intel¬lectual movement. Using an essentially Heideggerian view of language as a heuristic hypothesis, the name semiotics is examined in light of the re¬alization that only with Augustine's Latin signum was the possibility of a general doctrine of signs introduced, and that first among the later Latins was the idea of sign as a general mode of being specifically verifiable both in nature and in culture in establishing the texture of human experi¬ence vindicated according to an explanation of how such a general mode of being is possible. The contemporary resumption through Charles Peirce of the Latin line of vindication completed especially by Poinsot is ex-plored along these same lines in terms of considerations of why the term semiotics has emerged as, so to speak, the logically proper name of the global interest in signs.
More...
One of the seminal constructs in 20th-century biosemiotics is G. EvelynHutchinson's 'niche'. This notion opened up and unpacked car¬tesian space and time to recognize self-organizing roles in open, dynamical systems — in n-dimensional hyperspace. Perhaps equally valuable to biosemiotics is Hutchinson's inclusive approach to inquiry and his willingness to venture into abductive territory, which have reaped rewards for a range of disciplines beyond biology, from art to anthropology. Hutchinson assumed the fertility of inquiry flowing from open, far-from-equilibrium systems to be characterized by 'fabricational noise', following Seilacher, or 'order out of chaos', following Prigogine. Serendipitous 'noise' can self-organize into information at other levels, as does the 'noise' of Hutchinson's contributions themselves.
More...
This article compares the material pollution oflife's elementary resources, i.e., water, soil, and air, with the semiotic pollution of the elementary resources of sign-processes, i.e., channel, sign-matter, and message; code, signifier, and signified; as well as context, sender, and recipient. It is claimed that semiotic pollution interferes with sign-processes as much as material pollution interferes with the fundamental processes of life; both types of pollution are similar in that they produce stress for human beings in current societies. It is argued that semiotics is able to provide the conceptual tools necessary to develop policies that can reduce semiotic pollution. As is shown, however, additional research is required to operationalize and metricize generalized concepts of semiotic pollution such as "channel-related", "semiosis-related", and "situation-related noise".
More...
The paper examines V. Nabokov's "strange" novel "Bend Sinister". The fictional space of the novel is regarded as a process of interaction of different languages or different versions of reality. The philosopher Krug's story unrolls in the imaginary totalitarian state whose ideology combines the elements of fascism, communism and the language of mass psychology. At this level the text is identical with a "social message". The protagonist has to choose between a "private autonomy" and a "bad solidarity". The paper offers the new facts and documents referring to the key symbols of the novel. The language of "reality" is deconstructed in the protagonist's idiosyncratical language, the language of his thoughts, recollections and dreams. Scientific metaphors are crucial in the deconstruction and help to reveal metafictional nature of the text. The analogies with painting, relativist physics, logical paradoxes (Russell's and Godel's theories) permits to investigate the status of the fictional space, its development in time and the fiction of the Author.
More...
In the article the general verse metre theory and its application to Russian verse is adressed, allowing us, thereby, to observe not the single details, but only the most general characteristics of verse. The treatment can be summarised in the five following points: 1) the basis for the phenomenon of verse is its metrical code: the special feature of verse text is the presence of its metre (this feature is common to every verse type, to the most regular verse, as well as to vers H-bre); 2) the nature of verse metre is extralinguistic, there is no metre within a language, the latter can only induce certain limitations in choosing a me¬tre; 3) metre is an abstract chain of translational symmetry, the elementary period of which is called verse foot (i.e. firstly, verse feet are contained in every versification system, incl. syllabic verse and free verse, and, secondly, verse feet can not be defined in terms of natural language, e.g., as the combination of short and long or accented and unaccented syllables). 4) in verse text, metre appears through the medium of natural language: verse metre is coded in terms of natural language; the nature of its codification is determined by the versification system. Hence, every verse metre can be realised in different versification systems, e.g. iambus can occur in syllabic-accentual, syllabic-quantitative, and some other versification systems; 5.
More...
The essay informs on Gregory Bateson's holistic approach towards an epistemic view of nature. The ecology of mind relies upon a biological holism serving as a methodic tool to explain living "phenomena", like, e.g., communication, learning, and cognition. Starting from the idea, the smallest unit of information, Bateson developed a type hierarchy of learning that is based on a cybernetic view of mind. The communication model focuses on paradoxa caused by false signification. It leads to a pathogenesis of sckizophrenia that is subsumed under the conception of double binds. This ecosystemic perspective of living processes represents a truly (w)holistic theory of nature.
More...
Asking, whether plants have semiosis, the article gives a review of the works on phytosemiotics, referring to the tradition in botany that has seen plants as non-mechanic systems. This approach can use the concept of biological need as the primary holistic process in living systems. Demonstrating the similarity between the need and semiosis, it is concluded that sign is a meronomic entity. A distinction between five levels of sign systems is proposed: cellular, vegetative, animal, linguistic, and cultural. Vegetative sign systems are those which are responsible for the morphogenesis and differentiation within an organism, thus belonging to all multicellular organisms.
More...
The Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico foreshadowed many of the ideas currently being entertained by the modern cognitive and human sciences. By emphasizing the role of the imagination in the production of meaning, Vico showed how truly ingenious the first forms of representation were. His view that these forms were "poetic" is only now being given serious attention, as more and more linguists and psychologists come to realize the role of metaphor in the generation of abstract systems of representation. The Estonian semiotician Yuri Lotman espoused a basically similar view, highlighting the role of the poetic imagination in the generation of the textuality that holds cultures together in meaningful ways. A comparison of these two exceptional thinkers has never been entertained. This note aims to do exactly that. Specifically, it takes a first glimpse at the parallels of thought and method that inhere in the main works of these two ground-breaking thinkers. Such a comparison will establish a theoretical framework to make semiotics a true "science of the imagination". It will show that semiosis and representation are not tied to any innate neural mechanisms, but rather to a creative tendency in the human species to literally "invent itself".
More...
Signifying practices by which living creatures communicate, are, according to Sebeok, the survival-machines. Accordingly, as represented by the semiotic text analysis or Bakhtin's textology, one can speak about a human survival-machine. This has been studied by different semiotic schools (including the Moscow-Tartu school) referring to language, culture, genre and, importantly, text ideology. In this article, the aspects of textology in Peirce's generalized theory of signs become analysed. After a discussion of the concept of text in Peirce's (published and unpublished) writings, its relationship with semiosis and other Peircean categories is shown. The project of elaborating Peirce-based text-semiotics expects that it must be dramatically different from other sign-theoretical text-theories. This may be a path towards more inter-subjective and creative textology.
More...
The article mostly addresses Dostoevsky's own definitions of genres of his works, either explicated in the texts (subtitles, prefaces) or contained in the writer's letters; or rather the relationship between the scholarly strategies of defining genres and the writer's own view, as evidenced by subtitles which, in some sense, are part of the text (in nearly, but not precisely, the same way as the titles themselves are). The writer's own definitions, then, can be regarded as possible objects of the scholarly interpretation. Agreement, or lack thereof, between the author's and the scholars' definitions may be due both to similarity vs dissimilarity between the definition standards inherent in the respective epochs and to specific interpretation aspects. In the latter case, agreement is more common in studies focusing on vastly different problems unrelated to genre, whereas disagreement is more frequent in studies concerned with the genres of Dostoevsky's works. One of the reasons why his own definitions must be critically revisited is that certain titles of his works can be basically viewed as subtitles or genre definitions insofar as they in some way define the variety of the text regardless of the underlying criterion: narrative, "discourse", type of source, genre, or genre variety. Indeed, both these subtitles and, sometimes, the writer's own genre definitions turn out to be pretense, an imitation of "standard" subtitles or genre definitions, respectively. Titles themselves sometimes look like subtitles, thus "expos¬ing the device" and demonstrating this mimicry not merely by violating semantic and syntactic relations in the case of subtitles (sign/name/title/ subtitle and virtual reference/"reality" of text — and relationships such as those between title and subtitle; title and the principal text; and subtitle and prin¬cipal text), but also by the fact that their position is "marked". Dostoevsky not just failed to follow his own "final genre definitions" within the text, as reflected in the subtitles, and not just changed them repeatedly in his letters, […]
More...
Within the framework of this paper, a logical-philosophical ap¬proach to the meaning-carriers or meaning-processes is juxtaposed with the anthropological-biological concepts of subjective significance uniting both for the semiotics of culture and the semiotics of nature. It is assumed that certain objects, which are identifiable in the universe of man and in the world surrounding all living organisms as significant from the perspective of meaning-receivers, meaning-creators and meaning-utilizers, can be determined as signs when they represent other objects, perform certain tasks or satisfy certain needs of subjects. Hence, the meaning of signifying objects may be found either in the relation between the expression of a signifier and (1) a signified content, or (2) a signified function, or (3) a signified value of the cultural and natural objects subsumed by the interpreting subjects under the semiotic ones.
More...
